Iraq and the Arab world

Ice-cold contempt

Why the “Arab street” has not sounded as furious as it might have

SINCE the scandal over the American treatment of Iraqi prisoners erupted, the so-called Arab street has gone eerily silent. Certainly, commentators and café pundits have made plenty of hay over the superpower's shame. Yet the volume of outrage is less than might have been expected.

The silence is not the sound of forgiveness but of ice-cold contempt. If Arabs seem surprisingly unshocked by the hideous imagery, it is because they see it not as an aberration but as viscerally satisfying proof of the underlying nature, as they see it, of America's brash intrusion on to Arab soil. The cheap supremacist posing of a few reservists is seen as the logical consequence of America's higher-level posturing as what a prominent Saudi businessman calls “the region's dominatrix”.

Serious as it is, the Abu Ghraib scandal is only one in a string of indignities that Arabs perceive to have been heaped on them over the years. Long before September 11th, they cringed at seeing themselves depicted as Hollywood's seemingly favourite villains and bridled at what they see as America's apparently reflexive backing for Israel, right or wrong. In Arab eyes, the war on terror all too often took on shades of a broader hostility to Arabs and Muslims. Hence the Arabs' overwhelming opposition to America's invasion of Iraq.

“They ask us not to judge America by the Abu Ghraib guards,” says the well-heeled Egyptian agent for several American defence firms. “So why did they judge all Arabs by the 9/11 hijackers?” Such is the pain of the dwindling number of friends America has in the Arab world; some of the sharpest criticism of America, notes a western diplomat, now comes from Arab liberals who had shared American hopes of a democratic domino effect.

Among the larger number of Arabs predisposed to dislike America, the language is harsher. For Islamists, the sexual assault on Muslim dignity doubly confirms America's supposed secular depravity and a lingering Christian vindictiveness harking back to the crusades. One Islamist website gloated over this week's videotaped beheading of an American captive in Iraq.

Arab autocracy means that such feelings have yet to express themselves in political terms. Some analysts say, however, that Syria has felt able to ignore American demands, so prompting Mr Bush this week to impose long-threatened but limited economic sanctions, because some influential Syrians now predict an American failure in Iraq that means the superpower will soon be wary of telling weaklings such as Syria what to do. (The sanctions, which will cut the small volume of trade between the two countries, are punishment for Syria's alleged pursuit of chemical weapons and support for terrorist groups.) Others say that for the foreseeable future an American imprint on any policy proposal, such as the mooted Greater Middle East Democracy Initiative, will be a kiss of death.

A bevy of top Americans, including the secretary of state, Colin Powell, and the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, are on their way, to try to soothe Arab sensibilities. Mr Bush has bowed to Arab demands by sending a palliative letter to Palestine's prime minister, Ahmed Qurei. Despite having earlier appalled Arabs by endorsing plans by Israel's leader, Ariel Sharon, for a withdrawal from Gaza that would leave many Jewish settlements in the West Bank intact, the letter said that America “will not prejudice” the outcome of negotiations over the “final status” of the two states, including their borders.